Her: A Memoir (33 page)

“I have problems of my own with men,” Grace said. On the horizon only a sliver of gold sun remained and it looked as if it was kissing the meadow before us. “I’ve met a man so fierce I fear I’ll be tempted to sleep with him.” She smiled mischievously and sighed like a happy schoolgirl. She took a long drink of wine and then jumped to her feet. “I have an idea!” she squealed. “I’ll have to fix you two up now that you’re single.” She clapped her hands, applauding her idea. “That will solve my problem.” It was the beginning of night, and the steady hum of crickets and cicadas buzzed loudly in incandescent twilight.

The next day Grace and I went for a walk through the forest. We bravely plowed through an uncut path, pushing through briars and short prickly brush. Grace kept her head down, eyes on her feet. She watched her shoes crunch against leaves, not paying any mind to the husks of field stalks that whipped her legs. She walked quickly and kept up a good pace until she was far ahead, just a little spot of black hair and blue jeans in the distance.

I counted steps as we went, a ritual from childhood walks with Cara. We had a game we played called Fewest Steps to There and Back. The twin who arrived home from a stroll with the smallest number won the other’s dessert. I’d found myself playing the game alone since she died, on walks on city streets, down apartment hallways, through parking lots and offices. I tallied my steps and compared them against my own last best try. My award for having kept going was still dessert. I shoved my hands in my pockets and counted my way through the forest, remembering how good Cara was at Fewest Steps. She’d won every round.

“Chocolate or vanilla,” I shouted to Grace.

“What on earth do you mean, dear bird?” she called out.

“Cake.” I ran up beside her. “Let me make you one.” I’d started the venture of learning layer cakes just a couple of months before and discovered I had a talent for them. Why not practice on Grace? I liked the rules of baking, the rigid codes that left you with little room to improvise. Cakes had become my meditation, a place to retreat when I thought anxiety might get the best of me. I’d traded Valium for baking soda and whisks, and this was my secret for now. I didn’t want to tell a soul in case I decided to give it all up, my newly found health in calories and cholesterol.

“How about olive oil cake?” she asked. “I have all of the ingredients at home.” The wind picked up and blew Grace’s hair back, exposing her pale neck. “I forgot my scarf,” she said sadly. She could turn on a dime. Ethereal happiness and dark despair sparred within her, a fight so close to my own.

“Take my scarf,” I said and draped it over her shoulders. “I’m warm enough in my sweater.”

A hollow pop echoed through the trees, like a car backfiring.

“Did you hear that?” I asked, though I recognized the sound from my years at Camp Lejeune. Artillery fire. Or it could just as easily have been a clap of thunder as a gun.

“Let’s get home,” Grace said. “I’d hate for you not to have enough time for our cake. Also, we shouldn’t be out so late this time of year. It’s hunting season and we’re both dressed in black.”

Chapter 31

I
waited nervously for
Tony at the bar. He’d agreed to meet me in Manhattan for a drink. I’d finished a second cocktail when he pushed past the floor-length red velvet curtains that hung at the doorway. In daylight I’m certain the drapes are ridiculous, shabby, possibly puke splattered or torn or moth eaten. At night, after a strong drink, the drapes are a magical portal. They swayed from the bustle of patrons in for and out from drink, muffling laughter, arguments, and conversations on cell phones. They separated the doorman and the noise of the street from the speakeasy ambience of this candlelit waterhole. They swished open to welcome Tony to our second date. Our first date hadn’t really been a date. We met on a blind setup with Grace. We three had dined together at a Mexican restaurant upstate. Tony and I had been so caught in the electricity of our attraction, we’d forgotten Grace joined us.

I jumped from my bar stool and hugged him, clasping my hands and hanging my arms in a trusting circle around his neck. I gave him some of my weight and he held it nicely. Tony stands just under six feet tall and has broad muscled shoulders and arms. They’re the arms of a man who’s spent many hours at the gym, though long ago. The shape of the muscle is there, the girth and outline, though his middle is a soft round belly.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” I said.

“Me, too.”

Tony pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, though he was early. “What are we having?”

He folded his glasses and tucked them into his front shirt pocket, smiling boyishly. He knew what he was having.

“I’ll have a Jive Turkey,” he told the bartender.

“And the lady, what will she be having?” Tony asked me sweetly, looking at my empty cocktail glass. His steel blue eyes cut through the dark of the room; they were both warm and cold, welcoming and questioning, eyes that looked like they hid another, exhausted pair.

“I’ll have a Pick Me Up,” I told the bartender, after scanning the list of whiskeys and sours for something fruity but not too much so.

Tony looked good in his neatly pressed pink button-down shirt and blue jeans. How could a woman resist a big strong man wearing pink? I’d learned from Grace that Tony had been a sniper in the Marine Corps during the First Gulf War and had written a memoir about that time in his life. Could I be a match for a man who could shoot a gun, lay himself bare on the page, and wear cotton candy pastel?

Through e-mails and conversations over the telephone we had discovered that we had much in common. We’d both been raised by strict military fathers; had young marriages that ended in divorce because of the affairs we’d had; spent the same years on Camp Lejeune, but in different capacities—Tony could have been one of the young handsome privates I’d try to flirt with on weekends at the Jacksonville mall.

We also had both suffered the loss of a sibling in our late twenties. Tony grieved Jeff, his older brother, who lost a short battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in his mid-thirties. He told me he still had Jeff’s ashes in an urn on his desk. There was no place he’d found that had been right to scatter them. I’d met him just in time, he said. He’d traveled the world and found himself flat out and exhausted and running out of money and hope: he’d moved to a tiny cabin in upstate New York to try to make sense of his life, to reassess.

“So Grace says Cambodia is the next stop for you?” I asked, nibbling on the rind of the orange wedge from my drink. “Is that trip work related?”

Tony laughed. “I think I’ll stay where I am,” he said, “or move back to the city.”

“Why Cambodia?”

“It seemed like the farthest place away from Manhattan I could run,” he said and repositioned himself on his bar stool. “But now I’m not so sure I want that, to run.”

“I understand,” I said, and looked at him for a long time, wondering if he saw in me what I’d seen in him. I’d heard the legend of love at first sight, of just knowing you’d met the person you were about to share a vast love with, and I’d thought the idea was as jive a turkey as Tony’s drink. I wasn’t so sure anymore as I sat there and observed in this man a depth and kindness, a kinship and openness that moved me to feel I’d known him all my life.

“I had a feeling you would,” he said, and looked down bashfully.

I leaned in. The musky scent of soap on his collar sent a thrilling charge up my back. I couldn’t resist the man in pink. I kissed him quickly on the cheek, then fully on the mouth.

We stayed out until daybreak.

As we made our way out of an all-night restaurant, men with briefcases who were early to work hurried to their offices. “What’s next?” Tony asked.

I held my arm out to hail a taxi. One quickly pulled to the curb and Tony opened its door. “I’m going to take this cab home, alone,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

Tony drew his hand down to the small of my back and pulled me away from the taxi to face him. He squeezed my hips tenderly and slid his fingertips just beneath my waistband. We both grinned wide and then kissed in the street.

“Let me make you dinner over the weekend,” he said. “And then breakfast and lunch.”

He was confident I’d accept his invitation, though there was something else in his tone that was a bit uneasy, weary. “I’m an excellent cook,” he quickly added. “It would be my pleasure to prepare a meal for you.”

“Only if I can bring a cake,” I said, knowing I’d find a recipe I could spend a few days and all my nervous energy on.

*   *   *

For a time in college I’d fancied myself a poet: I was a poet and Cara wrote fiction. We were a word team, a double threat, and competitors in a duel. In our shared dorm room we stayed up late scribbling in notebooks, imagining our romantically impoverished future selves writing side by side by the light of a single candle, cupboards bare. I’d make popcorn in an air popper and we’d write and munch until the snack was gone and we’d wrung ourselves of every last letter and punctuation mark. We were writing for our lives. Words were our way out of Albany, our family, our dual struggles. Sometimes we’d read what we’d written out loud. Nearly everything we wrote during those years could be boiled down to love notes to each other.

We shared one story, and we argued over who would tell it first. These fights were like the ones we’d had as little girls. All of a sudden we’d break into brawl: hair pulling, rolling around on the floor, laughing and crying at the same time, biting each other, beating each other with our fists and with other weapons—a broom handle, a toy plastic horse with sharp hooves. I’d toss that horse at her like a throwing star. As children we’d fought for toys and attention. As adults we fought over memories and words.

At first, Cara won. I didn’t think I’d ever have the chops to beat her. She would never have told me to stop writing, but she did instruct me about which subjects were off-limits to my poetry. Those subjects turned out to be almost everything that had ever happened to either of us. It was unspoken that there wasn’t enough room in the universe for two Parravani writers. During the summer before our junior year at Bard College, I picked up a camera and stopped writing.

Then, in late April of our senior year, we were in our rusty black Saab, on the way to school to turn in our theses. We shared possession of the car, but when we were together, Cara always drove. On this afternoon, we each sat with a stack of papers cradled in our laps. Cara had written a novel and I had completed a paper on photography, a document that I barely cared about. Sitting with it, beside Cara and her novel, I saw that I hadn’t come near her accomplishment.

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said, “but I need to go to the darkroom tonight and print some photographs. I’ll need to use the car.”

“But there’s a party tonight in Tivoli,” Cara reminded me, flipping down the turn signal. She pulled away from the curb without looking for oncoming traffic. “You’ll have to go tomorrow. I’ve promised some people a ride to the party.”

“Seriously?” I sneered. “Since when do you care about a stupid party with people you’ll probably never even see again?”

“I don’t know, but I do. I care.”

“Please?” I was tired of asking. We’d split the cost of the car, though I used it less than half as much. “We always go where you want to go.”

“Nope,” Cara said. She looked down at the finished manuscript in her lap, careful to steady herself so it stayed put as she shifted gears. She’d positioned herself stiffly; her legs were the perfect table.

“Fine, then,” I huffed. “Let’s see how you like having your hard work ruined.” I grabbed her thesis and hung it halfway out my window. Its pages bent and snapped wildly in the wind. “If you don’t let me go to the darkroom tonight, your thesis is toast,” I warned. “I
will
let it fly.”

Cara looked at me in disbelief. “Grow up.”

“Why don’t you make me?” I said, face flushed, hands sweaty. It wasn’t the darkroom or the car that moved me to hang her manuscript out the window; it was rage. Hadn’t she silenced me? I’d given up something I’d loved nearly as much as I loved her so that she might have it without competition. And as it turned out in the car that afternoon, my gift to her still hadn’t been enough. I was full of remorse for having so easily given up the chance at my own manuscript, as if it hadn’t mattered. And didn’t she now have something I would never have? A story she cared about and had told well and might possibly tell the world.

“Fine.” Cara sighed and forced the car into fifth. She narrowed her brows and angrily grabbed my thesis, thrusting it out her window. “Don’t play a game of chicken with me. You’ll lose.” She gunned the gas. We flew past a cornfield on our right. Our car swerved over the median and back, toward a shallow ditch at the roadside. I held on to her pages as best I could, screaming at the top of my lungs, bracing for a crash. Cara’s pages flapped frantically outside at high speed, dangerously close to scattering—I didn’t really want to let them go. She knew that. She held the steering wheel with one hand and my thesis in the other. My pages whipped back and forth against her arm.

“Stop the car!” I yelled, but she drove on. “Slow down!” I begged, but there was no stopping her. I pulled up hard on the emergency brake to the loud gnawing of grinding gears and squealing tires. Our bodies slammed forward against our seat belts. We fishtailed and screeched to a halt. Thick hot white smoke billowed in a cloud from the pavement. Neither of us had held on.

I see now it was never the car we were battling for. We were fighting for the privilege of having an individual voice and of living a life apart from the other. I finally had those chances, with her death, but then I wanted nothing more than to be trapped inside our bubble together, finishing each other’s sentences. That day in our halted car we sat silent, the stench of burning rubber wafting in. It took some moments, but we turned to the other and smiled sheepishly and apologized. Our pages fluttered in a trail on the road behind us, all mixed up together, blowing beautifully toward lush farmland.